Hello, Whatnauts! As you can perhaps glean from the title of the post and the image and/or the tag, and/or the tracks of my tears, there won’t be a podcast this week due to the most heinous of failures–hard drive failure. I tried to back up my external hard drive *for the first time ever* after recording what was a truly great podcast with Graeme.

Believe me, when I tell you: it was quite a thing. Part of it was the fact we took some controversial stands. We compared Sandman: Overture to Pretty Deadly, with Pretty Deadly being preferred in some matters. We talked about the Fantagraphics Kickstarter — about which I was especially vexed — and I think finally nailed our discomfort with crowdfunding.

Since it was November and I was letting myself read Marvel books from the library, we discussed the oddness that is Guardians of Galaxy: The Power of Starhawk, with much bending of the knee at the work of Mr. Steve Gerber an an analysis of how aspects of the work are oddly prescient about fan culture today. Graeme, who’d actually read a lot of books in prep (including a ton of Green Hornet issues we never got around to discussing), listened to me rave about Akira Toriyama’s Cowa!, Four Color Fear, and other titles. We discussed DC’s move to New York; Marvel’s TV four-fer with Netflix; Jeph Loeb: Threat or Menace? with regards to the TV shows he’s worked on; and there was a long discussion of the beautifully written, gorgeously drawn Bad Houses by Sara Ryan and Carla Speed McNeil that Jeff both loved and had a lot of things to wring his hands over. And Graeme and I had a fight about Supergirl statues and DC promotional DVDs that was both heated and hilarious.

In short, it was a pretty darn good podcast that I am going insist–for now and forevermore–was out very, very best podcast and now it is lost to us forever. It’s like Hemingway’s Suitcase, except I also lost what would’ve been the entirety of the Wait, What podcast if they weren’t all uploaded to our server. As it is, the chance of me putting together a mega-edit of Graeme saying “Spectacular!” are even closer to zero than they were before.

So I am sorry, listeners — we did our duty and tech failed us. Maybe one day we can do a Kickstarter to get the data recovered — the estimate I got from this one service was that it would cost between $500 and $1400 — but for now all we can do is apologize. (And in my case, buy a new hard drive. And rebuild my iTunes music library (which may not be that hard since I have iTunes Match, maybe?)

We will record this week so there will be an ep next week…unless something goes desperately wrong AGAIN.

As always, thank you for your patience in these matters, and Graeme and I hope you are doing well.

Thanks for the detailed tease of the ep we will never hear, Jeff. Hope that you guys will revisit at least a few of those topics, especially Sandman v. Pretty Deadly, the Fanta kickstarter, and any Steve Gerber talk.

If either of you care to be a tad woo-woo/New Agey about this kerfuffle, allow me to point out that we are in fact at the very tail-end of the latest dreaded Mercury Retrograde, where computers are way more likely to get fucked, communication is shit, etc.

And before anyone gets snarky about astrology, I would ask you to ruminate fiercely on two things:
1) Grant Morrison believes in astrology (and everything else, granted)
2) We have no podcast today.

Here’s hoping for better planetary alignment or whatever next time…

(And P.S., Jeff, it is pretty much a certainty that everything is recoverable. My ex-brother-in-law has owned a data recovery business for the last 30 years and he is constantly recovering info off hard drives that are literally riddled with bullets, submerged in lakes, etc. He tells me it is nigh-impossible to truly destroy the information on a hard drive. However, as you found, it may be pricey to recover. Good luck!

Huh, that does indeed sound like a pretty interesting podcast. I’m sorry it was lost to the sands of time.

I’m curious what you have got against the FB kickstarter, though. Maybe it’s just because FB is my favorite comics publisher and I think it’s imperative that they keep on ticking, but I thought it was a great idea.

Oh man, really awful news, sorry. Pretty much all of my graduate work is saved on my PC, so I live in constant dread of this very thing happening. I remember weeping like a baby when I lost all my Napster and Kazaa songs in a harddrive crash in 2003, so I can only imagine what it feels like to lose something important.

As for the topics, I’d also like to second the request to revisit the Fanta discussion. I haven’t read too much about it; my thoughts were just (1) hey, didn’t Dan Nadel just try to son the entire internet for using Kickstarter? and (2) Having had a peak at the campaign, it’s definitely Fantagraphics, because even as donation rewards, the books are overpriced! I’d love to hear why both of you oppose it.

PS: If you’re serious about the WaitWhat?! Recovery Kickstarter, I’m in for a tenner.

I too would happily contribute to a data-recovery/new-hard-drive fund. Seems like an appropriate way for us listeners to give back a bit. Especially if it means I get to hear discussion of Gerber’s Guardians of the Galaxy, which might be my favorite comics ever.

I appreciate the idea, Gary, although I think the problem is there was actual damage of some kind to the drive head.

That being said: the problem came when I was backing up my WD 2TB MyPassport to my external Time Machine hard drive for the first time. (The Time Machine drive is a WD MyBook 4tb external hard drive.) This was after running the portable drive for approx. 3 hours while talking to Graeme. Since it was an initial back-up, it was taking a while and then, 90 minutes after it started backing up, the Passport started clicking. I tried to access it through the Mac Desktop but it was unresponsive, I tried shutting down the desktop but it wasn’t working (since it was trying to disconnect from the unresponsive drive).

When I powered back up, I couldn’t get my MacAir (running Maverick) to recognize the Passport, even though the Disk Utility drive. I tried swapping out the cord, and I also went and plugged the drive into Edi’s iMac (running, uh, Snow Leopard, I think?).

No dice. Admittedly all I did was a fast search on the Internet for help but it looks like the fact it’s not even showing at all in Disk Utility means I might be hosed. I ponied up too much money for a Mac App that looks like it’s great for recovering lost data on a working drive, but all of its troubleshooting told me to send it to their data recovery center.

So…what does everyone think?

(Oh, and I should say–Graeme and I very much appreciated *everyone’s* offer of assistance, financial or otherwise, and we’ll keep you posted.)

I feel your pain, JeffGraeme, since I’ve lost my share of hard-sweated-over stuff to techpocalypses past. In fact, I’m still terrified of this sort of thing happening, since pretty much all of my finished artwork is stored on this rickety old hard drive, which I don’t back up nearly often enough. No jinxes no jinxes no jinxes…